June 23, 2010

Earlier this year I wrote about XML and Data Warehousing, and I continue to see use cases where companies integrate XML data in their warehouses.

Some companies collect XML messages from transactional systems and use DB2’s pureXML features to extract a subset of the XML elements from each message and integrate these values into the relational tables of their warehouse. In other cases this mapping from XML to relational is avoided and XML documents are stored “as-is” in the warehouse.

June 17, 2010

Lee Ackermann has just published a nice article on developerWorks titled “Writing XQuery and SQL/XML queries for DB2 pureXML“. I’m calling it a Cheat Sheet because it’s not a tutorial for how to write XML queries, but a useful list of the most common types of of XML queries and updates. So, if you have a general idea how to write queries but just can’t seem to get the syntax right, or need an example here and there to refresh your memory, then this article is for you!

June 8, 2010

In case you haven’t heard about DB2 Express-C: It’s a free of version of the DB2 database server. The “C” stands for “Community Edition”.

And “free” means just that: there is no charge regardless of the number of installations, no matter whether you use it for trial, development, or production purposes. All of the core DB2 features are available, including all XML, SQL/XML, and XQuery features. This makes DB2 Express-C not only an attractive alternative to mySQL, but also to free XML databases such as eXist and others – especially if you need to manage both XML documents and relational data at the same time.

The version number 9.7.2 means that the previous DB2 Express 9.7 has been refreshed with the second Fixpack for DB2 9.7. This also includes a variety of useful enhancements that you can read about in Antonio’s blog and DB2 Express-C team blog.

DB2 Express-C is available on Linux, Windows, Solaris for Intel, and as a beta version also on Mac OS. Also, there is no limit on the database size or the number of users and connections that are supported. The only restriction is that this free version of DB2 will not exploit more than 2GB RAM or more than 2 CPU cores.

Personally I’m using DB2 Express-C on my laptop so that I can prototype XML applications and test XML queries or XML-based stored procedures wherever I go. And… I’m going to download DB2 Express-C 9.7.2 now so that I have the latest version with all fixes and all the new goodies!